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The Soul of the Cosmos and the Hierarchy of Life and Death
This is an excerpt from one of the presentations featured in the Pari Center’s event Bringing Meaning Back to Life, in Pari on September 2-9, 2025.
Schrodinger’s famous question “What is life?” leads to the equally important question “What is death?”. Evidently both play a crucial role in biological evolution but life and death – if interpreted in the broader sense of creation and destruction – are indispensable at many levels of matter, mind and spirit. On the material level, they are manifested over the vast range of scales associated with elementary particles, planets, stars, galaxies and the cosmos itself, since all of these are ephemeral. On the mental level, they are manifested through the evolution of ideas (including scientific paradigms) and cultures and the transience of civilizations. On the spiritual level, they are manifested in the striving for rebirth or transcendence of ego, this raising the question of whether the soul survives the death of the body. Addressing these issues entails an important dialogue between science and religion.
Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. For his PhD he studied the first second of the universe with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and Caltech. He then held Research Fellowships at Trinity College and the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge before moving to Queen Mary in 1985. He has also held Visiting Professorships at various institutes in America, Canada and Japan. His professional area of research is cosmology and astrophysics and includes such topics as the early universe, black holes, dark matter and the anthropic principle. He is the author of around 300 papers and the books Universe or Multiverse? and Quantum Black Holes.
He is also very interested in the role of consciousness, regarding mind as a fundamental rather than incidental feature of the Universe, and he is developing a new physical paradigm which accommodates normal, paranormal and transpersonal experiences. He also has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and religion and views psychical research as forming a bridge between them. He is President of the Scientific and Medical Network and a former President of the Society for Psychical Research.